Vancouver school board chairwoman Patti Bacchus speaks to media in 2010. Bacchus said Friday that a stay of the judge’s orders until June 30 would make sense to give school districts a chance to plan.

Photograph by: Vancouver Sun
, 00045053A SUN

The government is asking the B.C. Supreme Court to suspend key parts of the judge’s ruling in the teachers’ court case, pending an appeal.

Specifically, they are asking the court to stay the ruling that would see class size and composition rules revert to 2002 levels and the ruling that the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation can give its members copies of its closing argument, which quotes heavily from court-sealed cabinet documents.

The documents filed in court Friday include affidavits from school superintendents from around the province, citing the costs and disruption they say would occur if the teachers’ contract reverted back to 2002 terms.

Surrey would need to hire 445 new teachers, including 273 non-enrolling teachers like teacher-librarians, English Language Learner teachers, school counsellors and teachers who help struggling and special needs students, at a cost of $40 million a year, Surrey’s superintendent of schools Jordan Tinney says in his affidavit.

Other figures given in the affidavits include 228 teachers needed in Langley for $20.1 million, 277 teachers needed in Coquitlam for $26.3 million, 52 teachers in Kamloops-Thompson for $4.6 million and 34 teachers in Delta for $3.4 million.

Vancouver is not among the districts represented in the affidavits, however, earlier this week the Vancouver school board sent the provincial government a letter requesting funding be restored to a level that would allow that district to restore service levels to those of 2002, adjusted for enrolment and inflation. The VSB said that would cost an additional $47 million a year.

“All of this tells us how much money hasn’t been going into the schools,” said Vancouver board chairwoman Patti Bacchus. Bacchus said a stay of the judge’s orders until June 30 would make sense to give districts a chance to plan. Since bargaining is ongoing and the contract expired last June, any new contract could include changes for September.

Bacchus questioned the cost per teacher used in the affidavits, saying Vancouver uses a cost of about $74,000 per teacher when doing similar calculations. The cost per teacher is not exactly the same in each affidavit, however they are generally in the range of $85,000 to $92,000, including benefits.

Many of the affidavits say the most challenging aspect of restoring the 2002 contract would be meeting the class composition requirements, which limit the number of special needs students to three in one classroom. Tinney says in Surrey there are 848 students with “severe behaviour,” a category that the 2002 contract limits to one per classroom. In one secondary school, there are 15 students with this classification in the same grade, which Tinney says would make it challenging to offer even a mandatory class, like English, let alone enough electives.

The issue of special needs students and the resources required to teach them is at the heart of this court battle. BCTF research shows there are 16,163 classes in B.C. this year with four or more students entitled to an Individual Education Plan. Of those, the BCTF says, 3,800 classes have seven or more students with IEPs, which are used for a wide range of students who require extra support, including those who are gifted, learning disabled, behaviourally challenged and have other special needs.

Jim Iker, president of the BCTF, said B.C. has lost 1,400 specialist teachers, like special education teachers, counsellors or teacher librarians, since 2002.

Tinney notes in his affidavit that in the last 12 years special needs education has changed significantly. “The ways in which students have been designated as having special needs, the categories of designation and our services delivery models have all changed substantially,” Tinney wrote.

Besides the need to hire more teachers, the affidavits list other disruptions, including the need to build portable classrooms, restricted access to and choice in school programs, closures of daycare centres to accommodate more classrooms, recruitment challenges in finding the extra teachers, layoffs of classroom assistants and other issues.

Many of the affidavits include a paragraph that says the affidavit does not indicate an opinion about the outcome of the appeal, but rather a concern for stability, given that districts have already started budgeting and planning for next year.

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Susan Griffin’s ruling last month found the government has twice passed legislation that is unconstitutional because it strips teachers of bargaining rights on the topics of class size and composition. She also found that the Liberal government was preoccupied with a strategy to provoke a strike and did not bargain in good faith.

For a stay of proceeding to be granted, the appeal court must agree that the appeal has merit, that there would be irreparable harm to the applicant if refused and that the balance of convenience favours the applicant. The balance of convenience requirement asks the court to consider which of the two parties will suffer the greater harm from the stay. The government cites the “irreversible loss” of public funds as being contrary to the public interest, and says any harm to BCTF members in a stay is remediable, because they can retroactively grieve if the appeal is unsuccessful.

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